Clinical perspective, offered as context rather than as advice. The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated. Those two sets overlap less than the confident tone of most write-ups suggests, and the second set is where nearly all the disagreement on this board comes from.

TrialTracker_MD said:

Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a…

Thank you — that is the clearest version of this I have read, and I have read a lot of them. Adding it to my notes with a link back to this thread.

From the other side of the consultation, briefly. Whatever the answer turns out to be, the method for getting there is the same: state the assumption, do the arithmetic in public, and invite the correction. That is slower than asserting, and it is the only version that survives being wrong.

anders_CPH said:

Whatever the answer turns out to be, the method for getting there is the same: state the assumption, do the arithmetic in public, and invite the…

Can confirm. Same sequence, different timescale. Nothing to add that would improve it.

Moderator note: good thread. Keeping it here rather than moving it, because the question is general enough to be useful. Tagging this one for the weekly digest.